Something of the same nature holds good in the matter of sickness. Its injustice, too, is only apparent. If every kind of intemperance could be prevented, most, nay, in reality all diseases would be done away with. This inference may be arrived at by arguing as follows: If there were no moral evil in the world there would be no physical evil, and since an infinite number of diseases are direct consequences of certain offences, it is permissible to generalise and say that this holds good of them all.
Everything, then, is ordered upon moral principles. It is undeniable that life is a terrible thing, but this does not prove that God is unjust; he is offended, he is insulted, and to appease his anger blood is required. Man early comprehended his own fall, early understood that it is the innocent who must and alone can, by the transference of merit, atone for the sins of the guilty, that there is no salvation without the shedding of sacrificial blood.
Hence the idea of sacrifice is one of perpetual and keen interest to De Maistre. Sacrifice is ideal slaughter, slaughter the one and only aim of which is the accomplishment of what is right and meet. From the earliest ages men have offered both animal and human sacrifices; and in Christianity the practice is sanctified and acquires a deeper meaning. Here it is not any chance and possibly guilty individual who is the victim, but a being who is elected to die because of his innocence. This, therefore, is ideal sacrifice.
All this is undoubtedly an offence to reason. But contrariety to reason is the sign and seal of truth. The theory which is the most obviously reasonable is the theory which never stands the test of practice. Nothing could be more obviously reasonable than the whole philosophy of the eighteenth century, with its faith in man and its liberalism. But its very reasonableness bespeaks its superficiality. It satisfies reason; but experience opens men's eyes to its futility. Nothing seems more self-evident than that man is born free. Yet when Rousseau writes: "Man is born free, nevertheless he is everywhere in fetters," he does not notice that he is not only writing nonsense, but distinctly affirming that he is doing so. It would be quite as sensible to say; Sheep are born carnivorous, nevertheless they everywhere live on vegetable food. In the same way, nothing is theoretically more unreasonable than hereditary monarchy. If, without any previous experience, men were called on to choose a government, that man would be thought mad who hesitated to give an elective monarchy the preference over a hereditary one. And yet we know from experience that the latter is the best, the former the worst form of government. In other words, the world, far from being a reasonable world, is full of things that are profoundly at variance with reason.